GENEVA, June 29, 2018 (BSS/Xinhua) – The World Trade Organization (WTO) on Thursday
welcomed a white paper issued for the first time by China’s State Council
Information Office titled “China and the World Trade Organization.”
Trade officials said it spells out China’s commitments to the multilateral
trading system, which the WTO oversees. They would wait for the paper to be
posted in the WTO system and circulated among them.
WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell said that the secretariat of the organization
welcomes and always has the strong support that China has shown for the World
Trade Organization.
“China is active in all areas of the organization’s activities and it is
clear that China’s participation was vital to the successful negotiations in
both the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) and the plurilateral initiative
expanding the Information Technology Agreement,” he told Xinhua.
The TFA entered into force on Feb. 23, 2017, after the number of
ratifications for the agreement crossed the threshold of 110 of the WTO’s
members, and China was one of the first members to have signed it.
Along with the WTO, groups such as the United Nations Conference on Trade
and Development and the International Trade Center have long advocated the
advantages of the TFA, especially for developing countries.
The white paper, issued earlier Thursday, provides a description of China’s
vision and actions in advancing higher-level reform and opening-up and it
says China has “substantially opened its market to the world, and delivered
mutually beneficial and win-win outcomes on a wider scale.”
“By 2010, China had fulfilled all of its tariff reduction commitments,
reducing the average tariff level from 15.3 percent in 2001 to 9.8 percent,”
Vice Minister of Commerce Wang Shouwen said at a briefing on the white paper
Thursday.
He said that afterwards, China voluntarily slashed its import tariff rates
on an interim basis many times.
“In 2015, China’s trade-weighted average tariff was reduced to 4.4 percent,
fairly close to 2.4 percent of the United States and 3 percent of the
European Union,” said Wang, who also serves as Deputy China International
Trade Representative.
The white paper says, “China firmly observes and upholds the WTO rules, and
supports the multilateral trading system that is open, transparent, inclusive
and non-discriminatory.”
China will continue to give firm support to the WTO in playing a greater
role in global economic governance, it says.